Iannis Xenakis Herma1

Описание: Iannis Xenakis: "Herma" for piano (1961)

Premiered by the dedicatee Yuji Takahashi in Tokyo, 1962, Herma is Xenakis' first piece for the piano solo.

Herma means connection, but also foundation and embryo. A new step in the composer's line of work is applied here. The mathematical set theory will be the basis for the upper structure of the piece. The procedure will be re-used by the composer in Eonta (1963-64). Symbolic music as defined by the composer, the composition is based on transformations between a reference-set defined as "R" which includes all the pitches of the piano and three sub-sets,"A", "B" and "C", defined in their relations to the idea of "sound-clouds" again an original concept by Xenakis.

The "sound-clouds" are defined as follows: "A": the opposition between "clouds" and a linear ecriture; "B": "clouds" without pedal; "C": very "short clouds" with pedal.

The first exposition of those clouds is followed by their "complement": sounds which do not belong to any of them. The following operations are directly notated in the score using the set-theory notation as intersection, union, negation, complementary etc.

Xenakis makes a distinction between the, atemporal, abstract conception of the music ("hors-temps") and its transcription as a music score: its temporal realization ("en-temps"). The scale of intensities from "ppp" to "fff" is employed to clarify the perception of the a temporal concept during the pieces "temporal rendition" (i.e. performance).

Extremely difficult to perform, mostly due to its large dispersion over the keyboard range, the piece is a constant rise of tension until the most dense last page in "fff".
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